Some of my thoughts on emotional eating

Imagine going to doctor and expecting them to make a diagnosis based solely on you saying, "I feel bad." Is it a broken leg? A sore throat? A migraine?

For those of you who tend to medicate with food - eat in response to your emotions - this is how you typically diagnose your feelings.

Very rarely are you identifying whether or not you're sad, anxious, doubtful, happy, angry, lonely or whatever. You aren't conditioned to think that far.

Instead you just "feel something" and you've conditioned yourself with a knee jerk reaction to eat in response to it. If they're positive feelings, you'll feed them with food in an attempt to magnify them. If they're negative feelings, you'll feed them in an attempt to minimize them.

You're an emotional zombie - "Feel good, want more, food yum, more feel good," or "Feel bad, no like, food yum, food fix."

No matter how you're feeling, you've linked up in your mind that food will improve it. And since food does taste very good... since it does provide us with nourishment, instant gratification, and it just feels good - albeit very temporarily ... it's a self fulfilling cycle. You lose sight of the temporariness in the heat of the moment.

How do you expect to cope with your emotions if you're not really paying attention to them - if you're not actually identifying them? Instead, you're just "taste testing" them because before you can fully experience them, you've already dove right into your automatic eating. Going back to the doctor analogy, you essentially have one medication that you use for all ailments.

Our feelings are valuable sources of information. They generally tell us that something has to happen behaviorally.

When you develop a knack for identifying your emotions, for the first time you get to experience them in their raw form. This adds a layer of objectivity to how you're feeling and choosing to respond to them. Rather than making a hasty judgement that triggers your automatic "eat response," you see the emotion for what it is - you see why it's there - and now you can make more reasoned responses to it.

Good or bad, you should welcome the experience of your emotions. With more reasoned responses, you have "better control of the car." You can start living life, and definitely improving your physique, more methodically and deliberately.

By pinpointing your emotions - rather than slapping some vague label on them - you are less likely to be a slave to the emotionally reasoned and behaviorally ingrained response of eating. You become situationally aware. You can identify events, people, and thoughts that tend to elicit certain emotions that drive you toward food.

Once you increase awareness, you can start interrupting the automaticity of it all. You can start tinkering with new responses and building new habits.

Not only can this help control you're eating and thus your weight... it can also drastically improve your life. As things improve, you'll notice a shift from emotions driving eating to emotions driving living.

This is all very general. I'm talking big picture here. There are a ton of little "tricks" and exercises that I use to bolster my clients' awareness and knowledge - tools to help them identify and FEEL their emotions for what they are... and ultimately how to modify their response to them. It's definitely a learned mindset and the more experience you compile of consciously responding to your emotions, the better at it you become.

I think, at a minimum, it starts with familiarizing yourself with the spectrum of emotions you tend to feel. Write them down. Analyze them. Where did they come from? Did a thought trigger them and if so, what was it? Did a situation in your environment trigger them and if so what was it ?

Once you identify your actual emotions, You should also familiarize yourself with how you tend to respond to them.

This likely seems silly to some of you, and if so, I'm not talking to you. You likely have no sense of what it's like to lack coping strategies for your emotions.

For those of you who this does jive with... once you get better at identifying and analyzing your emotions as indicated above - beyond simply being more aware, present, and objective - you can also begin to replace your responses to various emotions with more productive behaviors.

This isn't easy. It's like building a good body. It takes time, patience, forgiveness, acceptance, lots of practice, and even more consistency.

But this is a start to the direction many emotional eaters need in my opinion.